Teddy Roosevelt on Wrestling vs. Jiujitsu 1905

Excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. 1919.

...Yesterday afternoon we had Professor Yamashita up here to wrestle with Grant. It was very interesting, but of course jiu jitsu and our wrestling are so far apart that it is difficult to make any comparison between them. Wrestling is simply a sport with rules almost as conventional as those of tennis, while jiu jitsu is really meant for practice in killing or disabling our adversary.

Professor Yoshiaki Yamashita

In consequence, Grant did not know what to do except to put Yamashita on his back, and Yamashita was perfectly content to be on his back. Inside of a minute Yamashita had choked Grant, and inside of two minutes more he got an elbow hold on him that would have enabled him to break his arm; so that there is no question but that he could have put Grant out.

So far this made it evident that the jiu jitsu man could handle the ordinary wrestler. But Grant, in the actual wrestling and throwing was about as good as the Japanese, and he was so much stronger that he evidently hurt and wore out the Japanese.

With a little practice in the art I am sure that one of our big wrestlers or boxers, simply because of his greatly superior strength, would be able to kill any of those Japanese, who though very good men for their inches and pounds are altogether too small to hold their own against big, powerful, quick men who are as well trained.

This reminds me of Starship Troopers, the original novel. The sergeant invites the recruits to take him down. A corn-fed all American boy charges him and fails. A little Japanese man comes next and gives the sergeant a real run for his money, even though he also fails in the end. That's when the protagonist comments that the big ox of a man who came first would never take out the sergeant, whereas the fellow who demonstrated strategy and technique would one day succeed. The sergeant himself ends up bowing to his adversary for a job well done.

This is pretty much the same thing for real. Really cool find, Phrost.

I see where it could be that, but Heinlein was honestly quite serious with Starship Troopers and fairly literal-minded. With the Cold War raging, he feared a democracy in peril and wanted young people to know that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That was pretty much his confessed motive for writing the book.